The film makes you feel dizzy. It was made in 1963, but it deceives you with its modest colourless settings and neutral appeals. The film leaves an incurable desire in the viewers; it’s clever, cunning, and vertiginous. It proceeds at a pace faster than the fastest of the action movies (one only has to trust the character guido, which arguably doesn’t take longer than the opening scene to get over). Putatively absorbing movies- some movies tell you a tale, some tell you a tale form the protagonist’s perspective, and some tell you a tale that you would want to tell the director-which is 8 ½ .
“It is better to destroy than to create, when one fails to create the bare essentials” professes the intellectual writer friend of the director. That sums it all. Guido renounces the movie at the end. “What a monstrous presumption to think that others would benefit by your squalid catalogue of mistakes”.
What strikes you in 8 ½ is the camera angles. For instance, guido (the protagonist) is conversing about the movie with the actress sitting in the chair before him, in the next instant we are shown a girl in her teens that guido is infatuated with.(at this moment, we don’t yet know if she is in a different place or in the same room as guido in). next shot, actress is nowhere in the screen save her gibberish about her role, and camera is behind guido’s head, from there we can see that the beautiful teenage girl is sitting with her legs crossed, sort of pensively. In the next shot, guido is consulted by a telephone operator, now the camera covers both the operator and guido. Next shot, we are shown the teenage beauty beside the man she is dating, who happens to be playing a piano.
Director Frederico Fellini’s dream sequences are vituperative, so to say. For even today, the sequences are superior to any dream sequence I have seen in any other movie. (David Lynch’s territory is quite different from dreams, he operates in ritualistic riddled dreams, and hence cannot be categorised as dreams, per say). Dreams in 8 ½ are clever, revealing, slowly and gradually they reveal to the viewer what any normal individual would have confronted in dreams. But the vicissitudes of Frederico Fellini’s dreams are closest that one can get to the experiential dreams. For his dreams are revelatory, but revelatory, only in the subsequent shots. With every scene, viewer is compelled to connect the scene with the immediate predecessors and feel emphatic with the ensuing meaning that is all there to encompass the meaning from subsequent scenes too. No single scene is revealing by itself, but together they are rich and honest. The scene where guido’s father is sitting in the lawn and he lowers him into the grave, scene where his mother kisses him on his cheeks, only to lock her lips into a passionate kiss, bemused guido pulls her apart from his embrace and finds that its his wife. Oh! The dreams are pure and the director is a reliable perfectionist.
Background is always revelatory. We are shown men conversing, (sometimes nonchalantly, other times tempestuously), but we are kept unawares of the background, as to where the men are walking to? Where are they seated? And then, in a brief shot, the background is revealed to us. It is at this point in time that we make a connection, the characters (that we are acquainted with) are seen against a background (that we are barely familiar with) and this we assume to be the connection. But Director’s view of what he wants us to see and what we perceive as have seen are more often than not, not the same. Perhaps, it is the director’s way of saying that guido is confused.
The scene where all the girls revolt is beautifully captured, and the ending of that scene is strikingly clarifying of doubts if any of the director’s ingenuity. The dancer is flogged and carried upstairs indicative of a job well done (guido himself is carried upstairs as a child buried under the sheets). And in this scene of revolt, under the linen, he relives the same moments, indicating a heretic life downstairs that he was carried away from in his childhood.
Masterpiece. thoroughly enjoyable. Similar movies: Synecdoche, Waking life, Jacob's ladder....
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